The mobile web meets Google Analytics
If you have a blog or website, you want statistics, the best place to get them currently is Google Analytics. The statistics are amazing in both detail and depth, with one exception identifying mobile devices.
If you have a Google Analytics account look under screen resolutions, you might see a variety of mobile devices screen sizes, you will have to add them up. In the last three weeks, 10 people viewed this blog on a mobile device. Unfortunately, under operating systems they appear to lumped into the group [not set] and I have trouble identifying them under browsers.
I also have AWstats on this website which does give more details on mobile devices. The mobile devices used in the past three weeks were Windows Mobile, Symbian and Play Station Portable. Because AWstats measures hits not visitor sessions, the data is not directly comparable. If you break it down you would estimate 4 Windows Mobile, 4 Symbian, 2 PSP devices. This is small in comparison to the over 3000 visitors in the same period who used a computer (2,500 windows machines, 440 Macs, 130 Linux and 10 others (sun, beos and RISC)). But as this blog is not optimised or written for mobile devices, it might account for the low traffic.
At the moment mobile device may only account for a small amount this blog and most other websites traffic, I would like Google Analytics to identify the number of mobile device visitors, so everybody can see what is happening and make any changes required.
August 24th, 2007 at 2:32 am
I noticed you don’t have a mobile style sheet on your page yet. This could help you fade out elements that mobile visitors might not be interested in.
I wrote a tutorial on how to link CSS on mobile devices: http://johannburkard.de/blablog/www/mobile/2007/06/02/Linking-CSS-for-handheld-devices-revisited.html
Hope you find it useful.
August 24th, 2007 at 6:30 am
I read your post (and am writing this comment) on my mobile - but I got here through RSS with Google Reader Mobile, which does an excellent job of reformatting pages to mobile friendly ones.
August 25th, 2007 at 11:22 am
[...] So here is one solution for how we can cater to our mobile readers cutesy of a comment on Nick Cowie’s post on The mobile web meets Google Analytic. Before I talk about the solution let me just thank Nick for telling me how to work out how many people are reading my blog posts from mobile devices. [...]
August 26th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Google has a habit of providing a great service but not extending it. GMail could be so much more than it currently is with better interface between CL. As for Analytics it gets a little vague in displaying information when the JS has the power to capture so much more.
December 11th, 2007 at 4:15 am
It’s not free but check out http://www.amethon.com or more specifically http://www.amethon.com/Content_Common/pg-Mobile-Analytics.seo
I’m sure Google will be buying us within a year and then it will be free. But if you have a commercial application that you need 100% accurate analytics for Mobile Browsers then check out Mobile Analytics from Amethon.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
dean.collins@amethon.com
January 8th, 2008 at 1:20 am
If your looking for free mobile web analytics like Google Analytics, our product is the only fully hosted solution. Others require installation on servers and processing of log files.
Javascript is not needed to get the info you need to analyze your mobile sites performance. We’re signing up beta testers so visit our site and request an invite.
Greg
http://www.mobilytics.net